About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Friday, December 21, 2012

The new film “The Impossible”, by Juan Antonio Bayona, takes
us, through the eyes of one Spanish family (depicted as British) through the
tsunami that hit much of the Indian Ocean shorelines on December 26, 2004.

The tsunami hits the family, relaxing in a Thailand resort,
suddenly, with a wind gust, odd animal behavior, and then a wave of about 20
feet smashing everything.

Almost any coastal community could be hit by a tsunami,
perhaps generated from an earthquake across an ocean, thousands of miles away.
The tsunami in the film was generated by an earthquake near Indonesia. There is a volcano in the Canary Islands
(Cumbre Vieja or“Old Summit”) which
could erupt, cause an underwater landslide generating a tsunami over 100 feet
high toward the East Coast.

The movie is about the separation and reuniting of the
family, which knows that if it can survive, it can go back to its own life in
England (or Spain). The film opens with
plane experiencing turbulence (as if from “Flight”) and shows the husband Henry
(Ewan McGregor) depending on his wife Maria (Naomi Watts) for reassurance that
they locked their house up before leaving.
Partners in marriage can watch one another’s back. They are both professionals, and she is a
doctor, staying at home to raise the kids. He’s a bit neurotic about keeping
his job.

Now, there are catastrophes that can destroy a homeland and
be so overwhelming as to throw anyone into homelessness and poverty. I’m at 300 feet, but if a Cumbre tsunami
really could be several hundred feet, I would experience instant poverty. The same could be true if we lost electricity
for months, as with a huge solar storm or EMP.
Therefore, “radical hospitality” becomes an important resource.

Lucas (Tom Holland, who puts in a virtuoso performance)
follows his badly wounded mother in a makeshift hospital. You wonder why British and US Naval hospital
ships weren’t available sooner to give the victims first class medical
treatment.

Henry is still back in the remains of the resort with his
two other sons and must go on a tedious quest to find the rest of his family.
At one point, he tells Thomas to look after the youngest child, and Thomas
says, “I’ve never looked after anyone before”.
Good moral point. Family
responsibility doesn’t have to wait for having one’s own children.

I wondered how the movie would work if it had been filmed in
Spanish with actors from that country. The film was shot in Thailand and
Barcelona with a Spanish production company.

Apparently there is a version dubbed in Spanish (prepared by
Warner Brothers).

Well known designer and television personality Nate Berkus (who often appeared om Oprah) lost a partner to the tsunami while they both vacationed in SriLanka (all the way across the Indian Ocean). He has discussed this on the Oprah show. One wonders why people that far away didn't have enough warning to evacuate.

Monday, December 03, 2012

There’s an earlier sci-fi film on the “solar flare” problem,
titled “Solar Crisis”, directed by Richard C. Sarafian and Alan Smithee, dating
back to 1989, from Trimark.

In 2025, there is a space station preparing to launch an
anti-matter bomb on the sun to redirect a huge “coronal mass ejection” that may
be capable of frying the entire Earth (or maybe just Mercury). The writing of
the film is campy, and it seems to be a Japanese production with aging American
stars (including Charlton Heston and Tim Matheson). There is a bizarre subplot involving control
of the Earth’s fried real estate (can one have land title to an entire planet?)
, and some desert sandstorm scenes that resemble the Australian Mad Max and Thunderdome movies
of the 80s. The script describes plenty
of other catastrophic plagues, such as locusts.

Newt Gingrich is said to have liked this film, but it come
from far too early in the genre before scientists really knew to take the
coronal mass ejection threat seriously. Ironically, though, the film was apparently made about the same time that Quebec had its big power outage in 1989 from a solar storm.

The spaceship has a personable but bossy computer like "HAL" in the "2001: A Space Odyssey" classic.

There are some pretty interesting special effects showing the innards of solar storms or sunspots right at the end.

Analytics

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for billboushkcf.blogspot.com

If you require any more information or have any questions about my privacy policy, please feel free to contact me by email at JBoushka@aol.com.

At billboushakcf.blogspot.com , the privacy of my visitors is of extreme importance to me. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by billboushkcf.blogspot.com and how it is used.

Log Files Like many other Web sites, billboushkcf.blogspot.com makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons billboushkacf.blogspot.com does not use cookies.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on billboushkacf.blogspot.com .
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to billboushkacf.blogspot.com and other sites on the Internet.
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following link.

Some of my advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on my site. My advertising partners include ....... Google Adsense

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on billboushkacf.blogspot.com send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

billboushkacf.blogspot.com has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. billboushkacf.blogspot.com 's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.